SPEAKER_01
But experientially, we are talking about a parallel plane, a virtual plane, that we can all access at the same time, individually, and that's living, that remembers what we've done.
SPEAKER_00
What is up, you guys? Today, I am so excited to share this conversation that I just had with Matthew Ball, amazing technology writer and author of my favorite new book, The Metaverse and How It Will Revolutionize Everything. Matthew is really the foremost thinker on The Metaverse. It's a buzzword that you've probably heard countless times over the course of really the last couple of years, but he has completely taken the world by storm on this topic.
The conversation ranged from the theory, the threads through time of where this all began, and really into the tactical investment landscape around it, and how you can participate in this future that is rapidly being built. It was mind bending, it completely blew my mind, and I really feel like I owe Matt some money for coming on because of how much I learned. So I am so excited to share this one with you.
And without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Matthew Ball. Competition for great talent is more brutal than ever. Almost every startup I know struggles to hire fast enough to keep up with demand.
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Matthew Ball, a complete legend in the writing, in the technology world. I first encountered your work basically while I was sitting around by myself during COVID. And I think probably there are a lot of people who have a similar experience as I do, which is COVID started, suddenly there were a lot of changes in the world, probably underselling it in that regard.
And we were all looking for things to do and things to learn about. And for me, one of those things was trying to understand where technology was going. There was this like massive shift in the technological ecosystem.
And you were one of the people that had this unique ability to distill all of this insane complexity that was happening in that ecosystem and deliver these amazing insights. And, you know, I dug into your work and started learning more about you. And as it turned out, that wasn't the beginning of your journey as a writer, you've been doing it for many years prior.
But I want to talk and maybe start before we get into all the specifics of your book and some of the things you're doing today with like your journey. Because I think this, you know, this book is the culmination of a long journey for you and one that you've been on for a while as a writer and also just as a person and developing your own patterns of thinking. So maybe we can just start there.
Like, what is your, your map of reality, Matt, like how did you kind of form that map of reality? Where are you from? What is your background? And let's see where that takes us.
SPEAKER_01
Well, first of all, thank you for the really kind words. It's, it's such a treat and honor to be told that I'm great at distilling complex information because that is, of course, what you do on a day to day basis. And so I'm hearing that from an expert.
Thank you. My background, so I'm Canadian, my OUs will give me away. You're talking about spending time during the pandemic.
I've lived in the States for more than a decade. Most of my Canadian accent had subsided. And then I spent most of 2020 in Canada.
And a lot of it has returned. But so I grew up in Canada from a fairly liberal family. My parents both worked in government.
My father was a speechwriter. So we get a little bit of the sense around the genes for writing. And my mother was a policy advisor.
And so they had always really instilled a love of learning. Reading was a very important part of my upbringing. Intellectual curiosity was key.
And my specific path to writing really reflected that I was working at Accenture as a corporate strategy consultant in their technology, media and telecommunications practice. And I was learning a ton. That's the incredible thing about management consulting.
But you usually don't have an opportunity to express it. You're junior, the partners lead the delivery, even if you disagree on the thesis. And so I started writing for myself really, because there was no audience.
What I thought, where I thought things were going. And I slowly started to pick up. I remember when Slate picked up and wrote about one of my essays.
I remember when Reuters did. I have the screen caps on my computer still, because I was stunned. And I've kept them ever since.
SPEAKER_00
What year is that?
SPEAKER_01
I think that was 2012. Maybe late 2011.
SPEAKER_00
I was on your site poking around at some of your earliest works and essays. I'm fascinated. And we've talked about it on several episodes.
I talked about it with Tim Urban, who you must know from Wait But Why. All of these people that I consider these titans now of really of idea creation and the intellectual gauntlet as it were, they all started with some kind of janky version of whatever it is they're doing today. And they were doing some really simple version of it before becoming who they were.
And it's not dissimilar to someone starting a small company and it was small for a really long time. It takes 10 years to become an overnight success, is a short way of saying it. But your earliest pieces on your website, I can find are like in 2015-ish time range and already starting to talk about.
You can see when you read them, the seeds of these ideas that have now grown and grown and grown over time. So it doesn't surprise me when you say that you were starting to hammer these things out in 2012 and that people were starting to notice.
SPEAKER_01
Totally. And whenever I'm asked about how I write or how long I write, the answer is usually I get really inspired and obsessed with sharing something. I'm either frustrated by the narrative or feel like I have a different perspective to add and I write over a month and a half most of my essays.
But that's always a limited perspective because I've always found that my most successful essays are by far those that I've taken a second pass at, usually a year, year and a half later. If you go through my website, you'll see the tick in the talk every time. My first big metaverse essay was the second time I took a crack at that thesis.
Last year, I wrote a nine part series, The Metaverse Primer, that was the backbone for this book and is, you know, I hope 20 times better and the result of 100 times more writing. And so I think that looking at the decade long success and edification and learning process is key, but also just remembering most of them are my second at bats, the ones that really connect with the ball.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, ball pun intended. I'm gonna have to make that pun over and over again, unfortunately. You're the baseball player.
I'm holding a baseball too. It's like my fidget toy. So when did you, I mean, when did you actually start to get obsessed with technology? Like you mentioned you loved reading growing up.
You're intellectually curious. Were you a sci-fi lover or were you reading like business type books?
SPEAKER_01
No, sci-fi and fantasy for sure. I remember going through the Dragon Ball phase in the early 90s. But I owned a business or, you know, quote unquote owned.
I had a business in the early 2000s flipping blackberries on Craigslist. I had a really good sense of what the value of these different devices were. And it was weird at the time.
If you remember, there were blackberries that had Wi-Fi, but no GPS. There were blackberries that had GPS, but no Wi-Fi. Then there were the 0000 models that had neither.
And it was also this weird point in time where we were still getting a $600 device for $99. And so when someone wanted to sell those devices secondhand, there was no real price discovery. People just said, I paid 99 bucks for it and I can get 300 bucks on Craigslist.
I'll take it. But I was sitting there saying, no, the market price for this is 600 bucks. So I would just go around Toronto at the time buying up all of these devices and then flipping them usually to people who worked at a bank.
Didn't care about the extra 50 bucks. Just wanted the device now.
SPEAKER_00
How old were you when you were doing that?
SPEAKER_01
You know, old enough that I wasn't letting my mother know that I was doing cash deals in a subway station, which I chose because there were cameras above. But I think I started doing that when I was 12 or 13, maybe.
SPEAKER_00
I love these stories as a side note of people I admire today, like their childhood hustles, those little things that people do. They're like lemonade stands that a lot of these people had. And a lot of them, for people that are now technologists, did revolve around some form of technology and jailbreaking iPhones and doing things like that.
It is definitely a common thread that you find today. It's almost like if you could invest in an index fund of all of the kids that are doing stuff like that today, I bet you'd turn out pretty well. 10, 15, 20 years in the future.
Okay, so you were a sci-fi lover. You loved fantasy. I'm in the same boat, by the way, like all of that stuff.
I'm actually going back now and on a big kick of reading some of the sci-fi stuff that I loved as a kid, which probably a lot of it resonates with the stuff you're interested in today and that you're writing about, you know, like Ender's Game and some of those, I don't know, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which Elon Musk often talks about as being one of his favorite books. That stuff is just so, so good. And it's so great to reread because you find these common threads that somehow tie to the reality that then has happened.
And not just in the technology sense, which I think a lot of people think about, but even like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has things in it where you're like, it feels like it predicted Donald Trump being elected president in some of the ways where they're talking about things early on. So it's quite, quite amazing. I want to talk about that concept of like threads through reality.
It's something I think about a lot as like a general framework, especially around technology where you have these ideas that have the seeds planted a long, long time ago, and that continues to grow and that thread continues to run throughout history. And now suddenly it becomes very real and you can see the kind of, you know, the blooming of that plant. And I feel like that is a really good framework for thinking about this concept of the metaverse and what you're writing about today, because you talk about it in your book and I don't want to give away too much.
The book is absolutely fantastic and we'll put in the show notes all of the information for where people can get it. But you talk in the early part of the book about some of those threads. And I'd love to just have you walk through a few of those, like where did those seeds of this metaverse idea start and how are you kind of tracking them over time to where they are today.
SPEAKER_01
So this is a really fun place to start because we're situated in this point where the narrative around the metaverse is either hyperacute. We're talking about Facebook's vision of the metaverse or we're talking about the metaverse as a buzzword in 2022. But of course, if you widen the aperture a little bit, we know that the term comes from 1992.
And so we start to look at this as a three decade exercise. Many of the leaders in the space Epic Games and Vidya, the seventh largest company globally were founded in the early 90s for this year. But in fact, as you're teeing up, you can go back to the 1930s and that's where we really start to see science fiction through popular works, describe these ideas, not in the term metaverse that comes decades later, but in idea, these virtual playgrounds, AI nurseries using holography and 3D TVs, VR goggles.
And then parallel to that is the development of the technologies which produce virtual experiences. They start in the 1940s, mainframes emerge in the 1950s. The first really 2D based metaverse experiences, 2D text versions of Roblox emerge in the 1960s and 70s.
And so we have these two parallel paths that bring us to today where the technology to realize the long considered vision starts to feel like a practical business opportunity, a practical product rather than just a fantastical one.
SPEAKER_00
It's so interesting, the way you said that I thought was very clarifying for me of like how it stops feeling like a fantastical one as you kind of progress through time because you always hear that quote of the things of the future feel like the toys of today or something like that. I don't know if it's Chris Dixon who originally said it, but someone in that general realm. Yeah, it's Dixon.
Yeah, and that's how I think about a lot of these things like in your book you talked about Stanley wine bomb and I think it was like pigmalion spectacle so site something very specific but he had like VR like goggles or Philip K. Dick and the world creation device and these science fiction authors were writing about and kind of crafting something that felt like a toy and I imagine when you were reading it back then it was like this child like curiosity and wonder that you would have with learning about those things and now you fast forward to today. And there are people building those exact things as part of this future as the infrastructure of this future that were that were envisioning so it is.
I mean, it is quite amazing the one other thing that jumps out to me. And I'd love to hear your perspectives on it is so much of the the metaverse of what we had read in kind of science fiction over all of those decades was very dystopian. You know, like, whether it's Stanley wine bomb or whether it's no crash or whether it's ready player one which is like my favorite example of it candidly just I love that love that book and my wife still makes fun of me for loving the movie because I think the book was actually much better than the movie for what it's worth.
But, you know, a lot of them are very dystopian it's like oh the world has gone to shit. And so here is this alternate world that is created where people spend their time because it's so much better than the reality even the matrix right it's like the same kind of general principle. Why do you think that is or like, and do you think that that has had a negative effect on societal perceptions of the metaverse and what it means for, you know, our collective future.
SPEAKER_01
Great question. Does it have a negative effect absolutely. And certainly if you are suffering from some form of confirmation bias, it reiterates that confirmation that bias.
There's an understandable hesitation about enlarging big techs involvement in our lives. And it's actually very easy to look at the big tech obsession with the metaverse for decades. And to say it's techno feudalist capitalist trying to enslave us or put us to work in yet another plane of existence.
And of course the fact that as you've described the metaverse in snow crash, the matrix in Neuromancer the matrix in the matrix, our dystopic doesn't help. But we should keep in mind that at the root of most fiction is drama and human drama tends to be the most potent form of drama put another way. There's a reason why most novels aren't set in utopias.
They're not very interesting, except when they go wrong. And so I look beyond that. And of course, I use all these lines throughout the book of Neil Stephenson trying to warn us away from a two literal read.
He says, keep in mind, I was just making shit up as I go along. But with that in mind, I think it is more helpful to look beyond a fictional representation from even a string of influential authors to the experiences. Second life, the text based worlds of the 60s and 70s, Roblox, Fortnite, they are not designed on subjugation, but self expression, collaboration, creation, kids who are in these adults who are in these environments.
Talk about how they feel good, how they connect more with individuals. That doesn't mean that technology can't be used for ill. But I would say stress the experiences that have been in development and experienced by billions at this point, rather than a string of authors writing a sci fi novel.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you hit on several really important points that I want to double down on. First off, Neil Stephenson, correct me if I'm wrong, author of Snow Crash, which is kind of like the first book that talked about the metaverse. He was dystopic.
But he had a outsized impact on the future in terms of his involvement in technology, right? Like he was early on with Blue Origin with Jeff. He was the first employee of Blue Origin. So he wasn't just some like sci fi author that did nothing else, right? Like he ended up becoming part of Blue Origin.
I think he's still a senior advisor to it. It's like, you know, the second most important space technology company in the world. I think like the early creators of Google Earth like Keyhole were relying on and like learning a lot from him.
Magic Leap, you know, VR company that raised a ton of money was also, you know, tied to him in a lot of ways. So he had an outsized impact from an actual technology standpoint as well. And then the other point you made is a really interesting one because I feel like I've heard this over and over again on this show and more broadly in talking to sort of like this next generation of leaders in the technology landscape that their most formative experiences growing up were in virtual worlds.
And whether that virtual world was like an AIM chat room, or whether it was Minecraft, or whether it was Roblox for some of the younger younger kids, it's really amazing. And a lot of them say like, look, we were kind of nerdy. We didn't really feel like we had that sense of community in the real world.
And with kids at school, we didn't fit in in the way that we were supposed to into that like nice neat, you know, square into a square. And so these worlds were our way of self expression. And like we had Gabby Goldberg on who's a, she's amazing, 23 year old investor at TCG Crypto you should meet for sure.
And she was like, telling us that she she was selectively mute, which effectively meant she didn't speak like a four year period of her life. And her escape was in chat rooms, like she was in these digital worlds engaging. And that was where she made her friends and expressed herself.
And so she says that it's now so logical for her to engage in this new kind of crypto economy and in discords and interact with people that are pseudonymous. It's really quite amazing the unlock it can have for people's mental health and, you know, and, and helping kids feel like they have communities and that they can be a part of something that doesn't just rely on being normal quote
SPEAKER_01
unquote. That's that's totally right. I think of two stories one comes from the Shopify founder and CEO Toby Lutke.
And he talks about the fact that Starcraft was more important than anything that he ever learned in school. And he talks about it because resource allocation, it is fitting in with a team it is understanding when what your best at is not necessarily what you should contribute to the team relative to its needs. And he talks cheekily about learning that the best strategy is sometimes doing things to distract your competitors, rather than to fortify your own kind of overt offense.
At the end of the day we're talking about this as a tool set. And what you're discussing with Gabby and with others is providing them with an increasingly fertile environment to build to try to best to learn and to co experience. One of the best things that we've experienced recently in gaming has actually been input devices, supporting those with different abilities.
If you're not familiar you should look up Xbox's accessibility screen. It's so clear that there is not a traditional business case for this type of device. It's designed for those who have no limb mobility.
Those who are constrained in it those who frankly can just speak or just move using a straw and their hands. And the premise is that virtual worlds which require very different physical abilities should be the single place in which we have the most people able to participate most often with the greatest range. And if you believe in network effects, one of the most potent discoveries of the digital era, you believe actually we may not have a direct business case for producing and distributing this device relative to what they can pay us and what we can charge for.
But the value that comes from bringing more people into the network, which enriches everyone else's experience gets us there. That's inspiring.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, extremely inspiring. I would encourage everyone to look this up by the way the Xbox adaptive controller. It does look quite amazing they have a video on the on the homepage of it that is, you know, really inspiring and heartwarming.
I actually, it reminds me of a conversation I had I'm going to name drop so I apologize in advance. Conversation I had with Tim Cook who's been a mentor and friend for for many years. And he was talking about this exact thing it was at an Apple annual shareholder meeting.
And someone, you know, there's always a few people who kind of ask the like gotcha question at those things right like they're trying to trip up the executive and someone asked him, will you commit that Apple will never make a decision that is not ROI positive for the company directly ROI positive for the company. And he responded and basically said no. He said no I will not say that.
And I'll give you an example and the example he gave was something like this, he said, Apple has a commitment to accessibility, we create, you know, accessible content for people that are blind. And there is absolutely no business case I can make to you that all the resources that we need to develop that are going to be ROI positive in terms of the additional sales and margin that it creates us as a company. But it's the right thing to do.
And it is core to the values that we are trying to create as a company and love them or hate them as a company and I know people say all sorts of things about about Apple, you know, detractors etc. I thought that that really resonated. And I thought it was really interesting and clearly, you know, Xbox similar, similar set of values around that but it is that principle of the Internet and the founding principle of the Internet and of technology of accessibility and opening up these worlds and being like truly positive some right of like creating a bigger, a bigger pie for everyone.
I would hope holds true as we think about this next era of the Internet and the metaverse. I feel like that does lead us to a natural point in this conversation where I do want to talk very specifically about the metaverse. We've been winding around it a lot talking about and honestly, society and the media has wound around this a lot over the last two years.
You've been writing about it and talking about it for much longer than anyone else, you know, at several years probably five plus years before it became Facebook's name. You were writing about it. You became as a result of all of your writing on it I think the like leading authority on this topic rightfully so, as you would just spent more hours thinking about it and kind of battle testing all of your frameworks and thinking.
Maybe we just start with the fact that your book is really the first time I've seen a comprehensive definition that feels understandable of what the hell is the metaverse when people talk about it. What does that mean? Would you mind just giving us the like fine points of that sort of at the high level. What does the metaverse mean to you?
SPEAKER_01
Sure. So one of the fun things about this is we get to differentiate between a technical definition and a description and what that actually means experientially. And by that I mean, go to Wikipedia and read the definition of the internet.
The technical definition is an internet working standard TCP IP or the internet protocol suite. It's a little bit more helpful to describe the internet. It talks about a network of networks supporting the worldwide web, email communications, file sharing and so forth.
And that does not get very close to describing what the internet does today, what applications were built on it and how it changes the world. And I don't mean that as a hedge. I mean this because I'm going to describe the metaverse, not define it, and that is a massively scaled and interoperable network of 3D rendered real time virtual worlds, which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of people, each with an individual sense of presence.
That's how I describe it because it allows me to hit on all the keywords synchronous persistent sense of presence. But experientially, we are talking about a parallel plane a virtual plane that we can all access at the same time individually. And that's living that remembers what we've done.
What's fascinating about that is, first of all, the technology to even have this sort of discussion is pretty new. Talking about operating something we can all access, you and I can often struggle to connect to a zoom reliably. And that's just a video feed on a half second delay.
But secondly, the technical complexity involves building for things that we never have to think of in the real world. We never say there are too many people in Idaho for Idaho to exist. We never say you can't carve your name into that tree, because the earth doesn't have the processing power to remember the carving.
And so those keywords are designed to express what we need for us all to be able to access the same live modifiable copy of a parallel plane.
SPEAKER_00
So there's so much here that I want to that I want to dig into. So first off, you know, I remember reading on this last point of like these random things that you don't think about about the technology that needs to be developed and that is is being developed presumably to enable this. One of them that jumps out to me from one of your prior pieces is this idea of everyone actually existing in the same plane at the same time.
And I remember it in the context of your it was your piece on the Travis Scott concert that happened in Fortnight. And I forget what the number was, but it was some like 20 million people. It was some absurd number of people.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, 28 million people. I mean, I'll break it down. I'll break it down for you.
Yeah, please. I'll just say this, I find it really fun. I'm excited that you share that perspective.
So 28 million people participated in the quote unquote live Travis Scott concert. Yeah, let's start from the perspective. Travis Scott wasn't live.
He was broadcast live. But everything that he was doing the animations, the vocal track that had all been done previously. But there weren't actually 28 million people participating in that concert.
There were over 250,000 simultaneous simulations of that concert. None of which were precisely in synchronization. I mean, some of them probably were but think of them as being 2050 80 millisecond separated a minute separated.
And each of those simulations was split into groups of 50 to 100. And that's because we don't have the technology required for even 200 people really to be in what we call a richly rendered virtual environment. When you play Fortnite, Fortnite has 100 players in it.
It kind of cheats through game design to get you there. Why? Because the map is two and a half kilometers by two and a half kilometers. And so for all intents and purposes, most of the players don't exist.
By the time you come to one another, most people have been purged. And so even when we think of these experiences having dozens of people, it's only through brilliant game design that we pull it off.
SPEAKER_00
That's so interesting. Okay, so now you're kind of sending me down a rabbit hole on this. So in these game worlds, it works because we're spread out as individual as players within this game.
Like if 500 people were to try to operate in a very tightly confined space within these worlds within a Fortnite game, it would actually like reduce the latency of the game because it would start struggling with it.
SPEAKER_01
Well, think of it as a simple way to think about it is the number of operations that can be processed per second. And those are scarce. Now, how can we manage that? You can have a lot of people able to do very little, or you can have few people able to do a lot.
And one of the ways that the Travis Scott concert actually manages is they turn off lots of functionality. You can't build, for example, you can't equip any weapon in many concerts, they actually take away your dance moves, you get to pick from two. And so what they do is they're scarce resources for computing power.
And the question is, how do you allocate them? More people, fewer things, more things, fewer people.
SPEAKER_00
Got it. Got it. Okay, so you kind of have like a fixed pie and it needs to be allocated in a certain way in order for this to operate and function. What is the actual, just from a technology standpoint, as you think about that, like so that is a fundamental constraint on us getting to the end state that you're ready to play with everyone.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That was getting to that end state. What is the actual technological constraint there? Like what would need to be true for 7 billion people to be able to operate? In a, you know, persistent environment together.
SPEAKER_01
So the basic answer is computing power, more of it. Okay, Christy Xen has this line that says we've always run out of computing power because as more is made available, we go after harder problems. The number of people we can render in a virtual environment is a good example.
When we can put more in, we put more in and therefore run out of what's spare. There are two ways to answer that. That is more power in your device or more power in a remote data center.
The challenge with the latter is, as we know, the internet is not reliable. It often spikes. We can struggle to have a high quality video conference.
And therefore we should think of this adage that has kind of fallen out of usage that comes from the 1990s from Sun Microsystems. The computer is the network. And so when we're thinking about the metaverse, a virtual persistent network of simulations, we want to think about the networks combined computing power, not just that of your device.
How we're going to solve for that is not yet clear. Some talk about decentralization, not just in the blockchain sense, but in the idea that think of the solar panel model. If your house has solar panels up top and you have excess power generation or capture, you can lend it out to your neighbor rather than needing to take it far away from the grid.
But in strict technical terms, the general consensus advocated by folks at Intel and Meta is a thousand factor increase in computing power. Wow. We are up about 100 since 2000. So we need a thousand on top of that.
SPEAKER_00
Wow. Although, I guess, you know, if you if you map out the way technology tends to accelerate, maybe a thousand X is not quite as crazy as it's, you know, it's not linear, right? Like if it's been 20 years to go 100 X, you know, it maybe stands to reason that there are these step function improvements that make that faster than you might otherwise assume.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. And look, the the field of quantum computing is one of those other areas where we think in terms of fantastical ideas. This is a Jetsons thing.
It's not a human thing. But there's increasing consensus that that technological problem will solve within our lifetime. In which case, we're no longer talking about Moore's law traditionally defined that chartable, predictable increase in computing power.
We're talking about, you know, the discovery of electricity versus the use of the flame for light.
SPEAKER_00
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You won't regret it. It's met. It's a little mind bending for me.
Like when I start to think about this, this does the same thing to my head as, you know, a conversation with Tim urban on the immensity of space and like the cosmic calendar, you know, and thinking about those massive leaps forward. As a society, this is like, it's it is a bit mind bending for me. The other thing, you know, you hit on decentralization.
One thing when I read your definition that I keep thinking about is this whole idea that there needs to be a standardized ledger across seven billion people or however many people are operating in this world of what has happened. Right. There has to be some way of if I go in and do something, it's somewhere stored like that I did that thing, whatever it was, whether I transact or whether I died or I gained points killed someone whatever. And then I leave and I come back in that needs to have been stored somewhere within some open ledger that is accessible now.
SPEAKER_01
A bunch of different ideas there right there's a question of does it need to be open, not necessarily right open as in readable to anyone and in fact one can certainly imagine many instances in which we don't want that information to be provided. Can you use a blockchain to store your 23 and me results. Yes, do you necessarily want that to be on an open ledger not necessarily.
But we do have these fundamental questions of, where is the record stored. And right now we actually have this privilege of the fact that we're mostly expressing our physical existence in digital space not virtual ones right Facebook is not your life. Even if to young girl or boy, it feels like their life, but you're expressing it right it's a photo of what you did you didn't do it there.
Your assets and your wealth. Exist in the real world, not in the virtual world. When you come into these questions about the reverse that you work inside a virtual plane you don't just use your iPhone to work through the Internet.
When you have virtual assets of extreme importance. What's the governance model, who has, you know, to use a buzzword custody of them. Do you want to trust someone of that importance, or do you want to trust no one, and therefore use consensus.
These are some of the open questions, but there are alternative opinions. So for example, Epic Games, which makes for the unreal engine a pioneer in the space has this perspective that they haven't stated but I might observe of solving for decentralization through democracy right democracy is a form of decentralized governance. We all have input and then we have centralized authorities who make the decision on our account.
They are doing something fascinating which is consistently relinquishing their rights over things they have rights to to hand them over to the judicial process. And that is kind of a perspective which is we may store Matt's record and virtual objects, we may store Jim's virtual business, but we are giving up the right to shut it down to take it to move it. That is up to the court process.
If we want to shut you down, an injunction is required, the same rights that a landlord would need to lock you out of your home, a virtual platform owner requires in a virtual space.
SPEAKER_00
And is that in an effort to set a precedent for other companies or operators to follow like what is your perspective on the reason they're doing that if they don't have to.
SPEAKER_01
You can think of three different potential answers. Number one is to pass the buck on the problem. Right moderation, virtual rights are hard.
There's a more optimistic perspective which is really the same but less cynical which is this is hard. We shouldn't be the ones who decided society should. And then the third is a recognition again these are all different skews of the same thing, a recognition that we actually have pretty good systems for this.
And this is where you get into the blockchain movement of how much is actually a technical requirement versus replicating the things we already have right so I'll give you an example. We talk about the importance of trust on the blockchain to manage who owns what. Well, we do have that system for example, it's deeds.
You don't worry I don't I don't know if you own your house or a condo it looks like a house but like you don't worry about the fact that your deed might be in a bank safety deposit box. It's written into a public record. And so it's partly I think these companies saying the enormity of what we want to build requires extraordinary trust in the system.
Extraordinary investment and we actually have these frameworks we need not reinvent we can iterate on. But even there we should pioneer on the 3d tools, not the societal governance and provisions.
SPEAKER_00
It also just strikes me as like, maybe it's partially your first rationale but like play the games that you're uniquely well suited to win and leave the other ones to other people and like for epic. I mean, the Unreal Engine when you see the new video like the new iterations of the Unreal Engine it is. It's scary.
When you watch some of the promo videos they put out for how incredible that technology is truly truly remarkable stuff when you when you see it and you see it in action. You know, one of the other things that strikes me as we walk through your your vision for this is that maybe there's some sort of like, it's probably actually true. It's almost like a progress people talk about progressive decentralization like the path towards dows that was a big thing within Web 3 it was like you don't just become decentralized overnight you kind of have progressive decentralization.
My analog here is like do we have sort of progressive metaversa metaversation where you know we we have what the current form is and over time you kind of make steady technological progress towards this end state vision of what you believe is kind of this true form of the metaverse because it does seem like some of these technical hurdles are, you know, 1020 30 years of building away like the ability to have 7 billion people in this simultaneously in the same world. That seems like a huge daunting task. Some of these other ones, it seems like you can kind of build workarounds right like the fortnight thing what they did with Travis Scott.
You can start to envision ways where well the 7 billion people aren't going to be in the same place all at once right so can you create these, you know, sort of simultaneous worlds that are that are operating probably and you can kind of work your way towards that end state progressively.
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely. Let me provide a three part framework. The first is precedent.
The second takes a look at societal changes. And then the third talks about step function changes. So if we take a look at the mobile and cloud era we're in right now, you can ask the question, when did it arrive.
And there isn't really a specific answer because there's no switch that flips. In 1973 we have the first mobile cellular call. We wouldn't say that the mobile era was here.
That was clearly a start, an important first step. 1991 we have the first 2G network in Norway. That's a wireless digital network required for data.
1992 we have IBM's first smartphone by the end of the 90s we have the BlackBerry the wireless application protocol. You probably remember growing up you'd access a primitive version of the web with a white background blue purple and red links and that was it. Then we start to get the first consumer smartphones like the BlackBerry Pearl and curve the first direct digital media services primarily in Japan building for the mobile web.
And then we get the iPhone 3G the first iPhone which was still 2G somewhere along that spectrum we start to mature into the mobile internet Europe. So that's one which is to recognize that these are multi decade transformations. The second is to understand generational change and here's where I also use a three point pitch.
The first is when the technology is available. The second is when you have a generation that grows up with that technology and is native to it in much the same way millennials were native to YouTube and they consumed content very differently. Just like Gen Z and Gen Alpha are growing up with Roblox three quarters of those between nine and 12 use Roblox regularly social media to them is 3D avatar based.
And so step one is when the technology is available to create a new generation. Step two is about when they start to use that content and then step three is the entrepreneur era and that's where we're still early in 3D. Zuckerberg creates Facebook in his dorms in his early 20s in the 2003 2004.
Evan Spiegel another child of the early mobile internet era in his early 20s creates Snapchat 2011. That third event is when that generation born of the new wave goes through the period of consuming content created by those which preceded that era and then goes on to make it themselves. And the last part of this three point framework is recognizing that while that's a continuum.
There's no sudden moment where you hit a new point. There are technological bursts and breakthroughs. We know that 3G and the iPhone were singular achievements that all of a sudden took us off the old trajectory.
That will be the same thing here.
SPEAKER_00
Do you think you're able to spot those in real time or is it only possible with the benefit of hindsight. Like I often feel when I when I read technology writers and I'm a huge fan of all these writers but you know the Ben Thompson and Benedict Evans and some of these people who I admire greatly. I feel like OK with the benefit of hindsight you're able to analyze and say oh this was a you know world changing event this was when everything changed etc.
But in the moment it's often very hard or even in advance it's very hard. Do you feel like it's going to be possible with this or are we going to be kind of left looking in hindsight as well.
SPEAKER_01
It kind of varies in the sense that sometimes you need to look back over multiple different years to understand that critical threshold. In other times we start to figure it out pretty quickly. So we were talking earlier about how many people are in a shared environment.
It was really around 2014 to 2016 that we had graphical processing units GPUs that were powerful enough and widely deployed enough into standard consumer hardware to support what we call high concurrency games. That's large numbers of people in the same shared simulation. It's no coincidence that around 2016 17 is when all of the major battle royale games came out.
Battle Royales were not a new idea but they were newly technologically possible. And by 2018 they were blowing the doors off of every precedent for what a game can do cultural impact revenue generation but more importantly reach. The entire traditional gaming industry has about 250 to 300 million people in it.
And yet the top five battle royales were reaching several hundred million people per day. Many of whom had never participated. And so it didn't take long to look at these and say no we reached a critical threshold maybe going from 100 people to 200 people or 100 to 500 is not that meaningful but somewhere between a dozen or 16.
That's what I remember for the Wii Mario card if you remember all of a sudden you could go to 16 different humans. Yeah somewhere between 16 and 100. We hit a critical breaking point and we understood that pretty quickly.
SPEAKER_00
It's it's making me want to ask you you know like what are the in your mind. What are going to be those like oh shit moments like when you see X you're going to your eyes are going to light up and be like oh my god this is coming or it's going to trigger you to think about you know oh we're actually making a real step function improvement here in regard to the metaverse.
SPEAKER_01
So there have been some recently I think when you look at Unreal Engine 5 which you mentioned and the metahumans creator and they have something called Live Link face that allows you to take your standard iPhone put it in front of you you create this realist acumen and then it mimics you live. You look at that and have we passed out of the uncanny valley doesn't look exactly like a human know but you realize that this is free pocket size instantaneous technology and you say holy crap. There's a tech demo that Unreal released called the Matrix Awakens and by the way if you haven't downloaded you guys have to download it now because it's coming off the store shortly and it's this extraordinarily large procedurally generated city there's 64000 cars that you can drive and crucially you can change all the settings so that you can see basically the developer mode so that you can see all of the polygons you can see how light refracts and you start to look at this and you say it's this fully immersive dynamic populated city where you can turn off the people drive any car that you see and see and feel how it's alive that to me is where you start to say what used to be hard is now easy and we have always learned that when that happens the world changes.
SPEAKER_00
Everyone has to go on the websites like go to unreal engine dot com and just spend an hour because it's like a total nerd rabbit hole going through these things the thing that got me about some of these videos is you can see. The like vibration in rocks or in the road in certain cases on things like that's how realistic it feels. When you're experiencing it like you can actually see the vibration of rocks as like rocks fall down around the main character around things it's truly remarkable to to experience and to your point.
That is one of the things that feels like the oh shit moment of where things are headed. You know so I do want to transition I know we've got about 10 minutes left. You're also an investor and you've spent much of the last five years I imagine investing in a lot of the technology companies and trends that you're writing about and that you're passionate and deep on.
What are like for an investor so kind of putting our putting our head our investor hats on you know I have a small fund. Many of our listeners invest you know personal or institutional capital. What are some of the most exciting on entrepreneurial opportunities that you see out there within this kind of broader ecosystem like is it infrastructure that's being developed.
Is it application layer stuff that's being developed. What are some of the things you're looking for that you're super excited about.
SPEAKER_01
Great question. I look right across infrastructure is really difficult. Why because the technical bottlenecks right now are so severe that while there's a lot of potential value and unlocking them.
They need to be unlocked for developers to then deploy them to then monetize them to then figure them out so that they're highly monetizable. And that ends up being a bit of a chicken and the egg problem where especially because of infrastructure it's capital intensive but not quick to deploy and where the actual value capture is uncertain. Is that ends up being a tough problem.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah sorry to interrupt you is that is the infrastructure. If I were to characterize it. Is it like the infrastructure problem right now is in like the research phase where many of the solutions are literally being developed at academic institutions by like researchers mathematicians people you know computer scientists that are really trying to envision and test them against these incredibly hard problems and they're still years away from taking those you know with anticipated solutions and then battle testing them in the kind of entrepreneurial gauntlet.
Is that a fair characterization.
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and I think if that's why if you take a look at many companies like Roblox like Roblox keeps hiring advanced technologists and PhD students who are coming out of the especially UC system. And that's actually really fun because what we're starting to talk about is this field that has been built for quite a while that now has some of the widest and most scaled testing environments right 10s of millions hundreds of millions of people with billions of dollars of infrastructure behind. I get really excited in the book.
I talk a lot about how it's weird that the metaphor seems to be coming from a relatively small part of the consumer leisure economy. And yet gaming companies have always been pioneers at some of the most sophisticated simulation exercises. You might remember early in the 2000s, PlayStation 2s were placed on export limitations because Japan believed that if they released their signature product, it would be used for terrorism.
Late last decade, the 25th most powerful computer owned by the US military was 1700 PlayStation 3s. And by the way, they said that by using PlayStation 3s interconnected D shell, they used 95% less energy to operate it and spent 10% of the alternative use. And so I know it sounds crazy to talk about like these advanced technologies trying to solve brutally hard problems, but like it's really, really well encapsulated here.
And so when you take a look at these companies like Epic and Roblox and Unity, they're attracting some of the world's most brilliant minds because they actually have a place to apply it like semantic recognition, not actually that fun for Skype. But you're talking about a virtual world where you're also trying to map that live to facial recognitions. You're also able to tap into Apple's AR sensors.
It's fun.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it reminds me of like Bell Labs. Like you're creating these modern day Bell Labs. For people that aren't familiar is like, you know, it was AT&T before AT&T, right? And it was like, you know, it's like the original skunkworks.
Yeah, exactly. It was like basically they brought together some of the smartest PhD scientists in the world. And what came out of there is completely remarkable when you look at the early technologies that were built and that, you know, were seated within that place that became, you know, like the future of semiconductors and the future of all of these industries was really created at Bell Labs.
You can trace their their lineage back to that. But you're kind of thinking about a world where some of these companies, I imagine Meta or Facebook is probably doing something similar where they're starting to amass a talent war chest of just brilliant minds to start thinking about and envisioning these extremely technical futures that need to be built. So that's on the infrastructure side.
I cut you off on the application side. What's getting you excited about investing?
SPEAKER_01
So I've kind of two things there. Number one is we have this ongoing lesson that trying to build the next big platform in computing, especially on the consumer side, less on the enterprise side. You shouldn't seek to do it.
And by that, I mean, there's this classic example of we've always known that a quote unquote federated identity system in the internet would be super useful. Microsoft tried twice in the 90s. You might remember the older listeners, the dot net framework.
And it didn't work because like no one wanted to sign up to have an account or identity system and they didn't want to proliferate it. It was scary in Microsoft is scary. What ended up being the way that four billion people would get a single identity system.
The answer was it started as a college hot or not, and then turned into a photo sharing and messaging platform. Epic has been focused on the metaverse for decades, but its onboard experience was a battle royale that was itself a pivot from a quasi, you know, necessarily a failed game, but a strong single light double. And so the ongoing lesson is trying to produce a really compelling fund social product, at least for me, I'm not a SAS or enterprise software investor that in particular takes advantage of new technologies.
That's the big one here. Snapchat didn't design itself to be an AR camera and spectacles company started on ephemeral messaging primarily for sexting. And so I'm really excited about that.
And entrepreneurs are the other side. My favorite entrepreneur are those who have spent a decade trying to solve these problems with a lot of backing but a company that was never going to see it through, because they come away with it. Firstly, having basically financed one of the world's rarest experiences on the corporate dollar.
Secondly, they've learned a lot. They've built up a network of people with shared acumen and expertise and a working relationship. And third, pretty pissed they haven't solved it yet.
And so they come out of that system. They know exactly what to do. They know exactly what not to do.
They know who they want to work with. And good heavens are they going to commit their life to solving it?
SPEAKER_00
I love both of those. You also hit on something that was a thread to the very beginning of this conversation when you talked about some of your best works of writing being your second at bat. And you referenced just now with Epic Games, Fortnite, sort of like a second at bat at that game or it was like a single or double.
And now it's become, I mean, it's really become what a lot of people point to as an early version of what the metaverse is and the way that people operate within it. So it's a great framework actually for thinking about these things. That second at bat.
I really, really like that. Where does, if at all, where does Web 3 fit into all of this? You know, I've been having and we have just as pretext, a lot of debates on this show. I'm sort of the curious observer kind of skeptic.
Greg, my cohost is a lot more optimistic on the future of Web 3, I would say. And, you know, what I struggle with here, as I think about it, is these technologies are, you sort of have this confluence of factors, right, where the technology required to make this work is extraordinary in terms of compute power, speed, all of these things that frankly like decentralization really struggles with. It's very, very difficult to do this in a centralized way, let alone a decentralized way from a governance standpoint from a technology standpoint, etc.
And so I struggle to understand how we can do this or how Web 3 really fits into this, at least at the like biggest infrastructure level of it. Maybe there are sort of applications that end up feeling like Web 3 or their token enabled and there's kind of components of Web 3 economies that fit into it. But I struggle to see it at like the broadest level of all of it.
SPEAKER_01
I think you and I are quite aligned here. I think there's enough that we do know to believe that elements of these systems are going to be important, partly because the enormity of the task requires us to tap into all available resources. Secondly, we don't just want a technologically realized metaverse, we want one that we're happy exists.
The principles of Web 3 are admirable. The idea that we need to contend with multi trillion dollar corporations, this is ready player one, this is Snow Crash. Well, the best defense of that is decentralized coordinated action, right, the idea that who's richer than Apple, all of us combine many times over.
And so some of the technological problems we do believe decentralization is required for. In some instances we know that the philosophy is relevant. In other instances, it's not about tapping into our technical resources.
It's our energy, our individual capital and collaborate is blockchain the best system for that not necessarily. But I like to highlight, you know, one of the perspectives of Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Epic Games, where he says it scams or the whole field is currently caught up with an intractable mix of scams, interesting decentralization and scams. But he's very clear saying that while we're surrounded with either overt misrepresentation, which I think is an important element, right, there are many people who overpromise what can be solved by these technologies.
And I think that that's not because they're necessarily wrong. It's just they're mistaking what's a human problem versus what's a technological problem. But a fundamental belief that there's something really interesting here.
And so that is to say in a simpler sense. I'm not one of the revisionists that believes that we're going to strip out TCP IP and replace it with Web three. But I do believe and am quite optimistic that parts of our future are going to be supplemented by these technologies.
But I do think it's still a little hard to see exactly where when and why.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it's I think that's the right way. It's the exact way that I think about it to where like the dogmatic perspective that it has to be Web three or Web two and there's not a blend of the two or a blurred line seems silly to me like even with desktop and mobile right like I'm sitting here on a desktop talking to you mobile exists and has proliferated obviously and change the world but there's still desktop it didn't just completely disappear and get ripped off the face of the earth. And I think about that similarly here.
I mean will NFTs digital ownership. Some of these components you know tokenization community governance like some of these things will they be components of this future. I can totally see and make a case where that is you know where that is true.
But at the infrastructure level I would you know color me skeptical I suppose for the ability to do this at a grand scale and maybe there will be some innovation that completely changes that and I get completely wiped off and I'm notoriously bad at making those long term predictions so I look forward to be proving wrong in that regard. I want to close with just two questions for you. As we as we wrap up.
First, what do you think are the greatest risks to this future. Like if you were to be scared or be kept up at night by something about this future that you're writing about and envisioning. What would that be.
SPEAKER_01
This kind of connects to the web three movement. I think that the web three movement is really powered by this dissatisfaction with the last 15 years. And I think that for a long time we tried to lull our sense into the idea that it was a good trajectory, because we received really high quality products for free.
And yet the fact that I'm not trying to make a specific Facebook point but as an example, we got Instagram, which was incredible for free doesn't mean that the value exchange was just the fact that Google Maps was stunning back in the day and still is for free. The fact that there's two sides of that transaction doesn't mean that the trade was right. And I think many people have woken up in 2021 22 and said, I don't like the arc of technology.
It is not advantaging me. It is having deleterious effects on society, and we don't know how to manage it. I think that's powering the web three movement at large, and perhaps an overcorrection to no centralization.
And this connects to your question more directly. I think we can fairly look at the state of the internet today and identify many problems, missing disinformation, radicalization, toxicity, harassment, abuse, data rights, data security, data literacy, platform power, platform regulation. And we can understand how every one of them will be exacerbated by the metaverse because it means that the importance of what we do online increases and the amount of society that goes online increases.
And frankly, we're 15 years in and we haven't gotten great at solving any of those questions. That's a reason to be up at night. It's also a reason why many people are worried that the tech titans are focused on what's next without having solved what is.
And yet I also find this inspiring because every platform shift. The current crop seems infallible. There was no way to look at Microsoft in the late 1990s and believe that we would be in a future where none of us use windows on our phone and that our PCs would be a minority share of it that Internet Explorer wouldn't exist.
That being wouldn't be a thing. And so I get inspired by the idea that we as users, consumers, voters, developers, governments have real agency over that future. And if we don't like what happens now, we don't need Web three, but the spirit of it and action allows us to change the powers that be extremely well said, you know, I am.
SPEAKER_00
I think there's this pervasive false narrative around digital worlds that they need to be or should be or will be perfect. And if they're not, oh my God, you know, awful, we need to reprimand everyone, we need to, you know, regulate do all of these things, right. And it strikes me as nonsensical because why would we assume that our digital worlds will be perfect and utopian if our real worlds are not that we're really creating this false standard.
It's the same thing that has applied to like autonomous vehicles, right. When you have an accident where like a robot kills a human, we've decided that n over zero is completely intolerable. When really it should be, you know, whatever T like the number of deaths from human on human accidents minus one should mean that we would go with autonomous vehicles.
But we create this false standard that technology needs to be perfect, completely idealistic for it to exist. Otherwise it's intolerable and I think we're doing that now as a society as we think about the development of these digital worlds and of the metaverse. So it'll be interesting to follow that thread I think through time as things progress.
Last question before I lose you predictions for the future. So we've talked a lot about the future impossible to predict always and very funny to even ask you to do this. I'm just going to try to frame it in a simple way.
What will happen first. A man will walk on the face of Mars, or we will be able to exist in a world that looks like ready player one.
SPEAKER_01
The latter, because I think we're going to spoof most of it and so it looks like ready player one but isn't.
SPEAKER_00
Okay, it's a good answer and spoofing most of it. I think it would be an amazing, amazing world to be able to do that. I mean, I am hopeful that I am going to be able to operate in worlds like this in the next, you know, one or two decades and that my son will be able to experience them as he gets, you know, as he comes into his teenage years.
So I hope you're right.
SPEAKER_01
But I do think that the to not cheat the answer. And by the way, one of the most fun parts about this book was spending time with game developers who explain exactly how they cheat physics. But with a view to how you can't beat physics going to Mars, you have to collaborate with it.
I think to not cheat your answer, I think we'll hit Mars first. And I certainly hope that's the case.
SPEAKER_00
It is a giant leap for humanity in both regards, both on the technological side to live in a world where we do have something like a ready player one, but also reaching Mars as a, you know, to become an interplanetary species would certainly be something very cool. I mean, I saw Tim Urban tweeted something about this the other day that what a cool thing that we're going to get to be hopefully fingers crossed alive during the time when humanity makes one of its great, you know, three or four leaps in the history of the world. That we get to be alive during that is a pretty cool thing.
Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Everyone seriously everyone should go online or go to your local bookstore and buy this book it I read it over the weekend prior to having this conversation with you and was completely immersed in it. You know, like I have a newborn son at home and my wife was staring daggers at me because I was sitting out by the pool and just completely locked in and obsessed with what you had written.
The book is called The Metaverse and how it will revolutionize everything. It will be released on July 19th globally. Is that correct? And I'm sure you're going to be out and about and doing the doing the tour and we're going to see a lot of you over the coming weeks, which I am personally extremely excited about.
It was an absolute honor to have you and have this conversation. I feel like I owe you money for coming on because of how much I learned from it.
SPEAKER_01
That's too kind.
SPEAKER_00
Thanks, man. Thank you.